


One Page Is Missing

by PlaidAdder



Series: Missing Pages [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: ACD Canon, Book: The Hound of the Baskervilles, First Time, Jealousy, M/M, One Night Stands, One Shot, POV First Person, POV John Watson, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:21:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13757166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: "From this point onward I will follow the course of events by transcribing my own letters to Mr. Sherlock Holmes which lie before me on the table. One page is missing, but otherwise they are exactly as written and show my feelings and suspicions of the moment more accurately than my memory, clear as it is upon these tragic events, can possibly do."--The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 8****This is the missing page.





	One Page Is Missing

_Baskerville Hall, October 17._

My Dear Holmes,

It is with some apprehension that I begin this addendum, for I have grave misgivings about communicating to you the events I must describe. And yet you have so often impressed upon me the importance of trifles, and I have so often found that a circumstance which I accounted trivial has been discovered by you to be of momentous significance, that I cannot justify omitting it from this narrative, be the consequences what they may.

Since coming to Baskerville Hall, I have on the whole slept wretchedly. Apart from Barrymore's prowling and his wife's continual sobbing, there is the matter of the moonlight. On fine nights it is bright enough to read by; and yet, as often as I rise to draw the curtains across the window, so often I find my hand faltering. I stand, arrested by the loveliness of the nocturnal scene before me, gazing now on the moon's white face, now on the silvered leaves of the surrounding trees, now on the dim shapes traced by the fading light upon the distant moor. Tonight, the boughs of the trees sighed in the wind, writhing as if with some unspoken sorrow or suppressed desire, and through the shifting gaps between them I caught glimpses of that desolate landscape and its wild beauty. The moor-grass, and the moor-hills themselves, seemed to undulate like the waves of a sea which is only temporarily becalmed. I thought, for the thousandth time that night, of the strange figure I had seen silhouetted against the moon last night. I felt, of a sudden, as if I were not standing by the bedroom window in my dressing-gown and slippers, but running bare-headed and bare-footed across the moor, listening to the unholy cry of that invisible hound, gazing with mingled terror and fascination upon the brooding and silent figure of the man on the tor.

I tore myself abruptly from the window and its view, shed my gown and slippers, and bundled myself back into bed. My unwillingness or perhaps inability to drive from my mind that ominous shadow troubled me deeply. The man I saw on the tor is, I am certain, entirely a stranger to me; and yet, though I should and do fear him, thoughts of him also call forth a yearning for which I am quite unable to account. This mixture of apprehension and affection is both inexpressibly troubling and strangely compelling, and it is my earnest hope to one day banish this confusion forever from my poor addled brain. Shutting my eyes tight and pulling the bedclothes up under my chin, I embarked upon what I feared would be a fruitless search for sleep.

I must have drifted off, however, for my next recollection is of being awakened by the sound of a window being drawn up. I twisted round to look. A thrill of horror passed through my veins as I saw, as clearly as if it had been chiseled into the disc of the moon itself, the outline of a man climbing through it. The room itself was dark--I had no candle lit--and all the light was at his back. He was bare-headed, wrapped in a greatcoat whose collar points jutted out, giving his outline a wolflike shape. He was crouched upon the sill, resting one bare foot upon the floor, testing the boards. Satisfied, evidently, he rested his weight on that foot, drawing the rest of himself through the aperture. Still on tip-toe, he turned round to shut the window, so gently that had I still been sleeping I should not have heard the sound. His coat billowed briefly, blotting out his shape, then fell rustling to the floor. On his long, thin legs I saw the tall, spare, angular figure stalk toward me--silently, but with deadly purpose.

I knew that it was the man on the tor. I knew it the way one knows things in a dream. You would, of course, tell me that I had unconsciously compared the impression in my mind with the sight before my eyes and drawn the conclusion without realizing I was weighing up the evidence. How I wished, at the moment, that you were there--to tell me that, or to tell me anything, or indeed to wake me from the state of paralyzed half-awareness in which I was trapped. I am a grown man; I am no stranger to violence; I had a fully loaded revolver within reach. And yet, I allowed the man on the tor to steal his march upon me. I felt, I believe, something of the terrified anticipation that seized the young Laura in LeFanu's _Carmilla_ , when she woke at night to see the lovely and voluptuous form of the foul vampire crouched at her bedside, imploring and triumphant at once.

The old bedstead creaked around me it received the weight of that dark figure. He planted one knee on either side of my hips, resting his weight on my abdomen. I felt each of his hands grip one of my shoulders. I watched with open eyes as his head bent toward mine. The moonlight still streaming through the window caught his features for a moment. I saw, as if traced in phosphorous, the bridge of a sharp, aquiline nose--the sweep of high and chiseled cheekbones--the curve of one well-remembered eyebrow--the gleam of an eye whose every trick of expression was far more familiar to me than my own.

I drew breath to call out your name.

He laid a hand across my mouth. His lips pressed against my ear.

"It is of the utmost importance that you do nothing to alarm the household," he hissed, in a low and curiously thrilling whisper. "If you won't think of the danger, think of the scandal. You must not, on any account, raise your voice above a whisper. Will you give me your word upon that?"

I nodded.

He removed his hand. I looked into his eyes, so close to mine, so large and dark, shining with faint reflections of that intoxicating moonlight.

"Now, Watson," he whispered. "What the devil do you mean by it?"

"I don't understand," I whispered in return.

"Do not prevaricate with me," he hissed back. "Those reports of yours. You are doing it expressly to vex me. It cannot possibly be accidental."

"My dear fellow--" I began, but he laid a finger against my lips.

"I am familiar with your love of sensation and your predilection for colour and life," he said, in a whisper that was very nearly a growl. His breath caressed my ear, and made my whole skin shiver. "But really, Watson this is too transparent. In what way could it be useful to me to hear that Miss Stapleton is 'a very fascinating and beautiful woman'? If indeed you find there is 'something tropical and exciting about her,' what bearing could that possibly have upon the case?"

Feeling the words I had written in my first report to you come back to me borne upon the hot breath of this man who was both you and not you, both the stranger upon the tor and my most intimate friend, produced an effect which I fear it is not in my power to describe. I can only tell you what I did, which was to feel every hair on my body stand on end, and begin to writhe, very slowly, as if in imitation of those gnarled and wind-tossed boughs outside my window.

"It might be argued," said the man, as his hand slipped from my shoulder to the curve of my throat, "that this description of her was justified by way of accounting for Sir Henry's attraction to her. I might allow that," he said--and now his hand traced the side of my neck to cup the angle of my jaw--"if you did not inform me in the next breath that her brother, too, has 'hidden fires.' Nor is there any need to continually stress the tortured handsomeness of the butler Barrymore, or the athletic carriage and rugged good looks of your half-American heart-throb, Sir Henry Baskerville."

"You asked me to record my impressions," I gasped.

The impressions I felt at that moment, I cannot possibly record. Nor ought I to attempt a detailed description of the tingling of my nerves as, bringing his lips within a hair's-breadth of my own, he murmured, "You've never, in any of your chronicles, described  _me_  as 'handsome.' "

Now stung as much as I was--I will confess--stimulated, I whispered back, "It forms no part of my craft to state the obvious. Water is wet, moonlight is pretty, mysteries are mysterious, Sherlock Holmes is a handsome devil--that is not how one goes about it."

"How does one go about it, then?" he whispered.

"One says not more than what one feels, but rather less," I murmured back. "One leaves to the reader the pleasures of inference and deduction. One intrigues and tantalizes and, incidentally, one keeps one's name and the name of one's dearest friend out of the papers and, possibly, the police-court."

He drew breath to reply. And I am afraid that I put my two hands round the back of his head and drew it, rather sharply, down towards mine.

Here, it pains me to report, my courage fails me. How can I describe the taste of his mouth and the touch of his hands, knowing now what I did not know then? For when I at last fell asleep in his arms, murmuring back the endearments he had so recently lavished upon me, I believed that the man on the tor and you, my dear fellow, were one and the same. I fell asleep certain that all I had ever wished for had come to pass in this solitary nocturnal visit, and that upon the morrow I would wake and look with calm contentment upon your dear face, happy in the knowledge that you had come to me at last, drawn from London by a jealousy I had unwittingly inspired, but which we now no longer needed. 

And yet, what was my horror when, as the sunlight poured in through the window, I opened my eyes and found myself in bed,  _alone!_

I sprang up and immediately searched the room. But I could find no trace of my nocturnal visitor, nor any evidence that anyone had been in my bedroom at all that night, save for myself. The embarrassing state of the bedclothes did testify, in mortifying fashion, that at least some of what I remembered had occurred. But all the evidence forced upon me the conclusion that the events of last night had involved myself alone. Had my visitor been yourself, you of course would not have slunk away while I slept like a thief departing the scene of his crime; and in any case, you were in London upon urgent business, were you not? But had he been the man on the tor, surely he would have left traces of his presence, and perhaps even perpetrated some cruel mischief upon my person. I could only conclude that, after lingering too long in the romantic moonlight, thinking of the man on the tor, and feeling--as I always feel, with all these shadows gathering round me and the powers of darkness becoming ever more exalted--an intense longing to have you, my dear fellow, once more by side and sharing my adventures, I fell prey to one of those dreams that are so lifelike that even after we have awoken, we are never entirely sure that they have not really taken place. 

These are my conclusions regarding the unprecedented adventure of last night. I communicate them to you primarily because I am aware that my own powers of interpretation are feeble, and that this somewhat macabre narrative may convey to you something of importance which I myself have somehow missed. Please excuse any infelicity of expression or want of decorum in the above narrative, which I have striven only to render as faithfully as possible, without attempting in any way to adjust it in order to produce any particular impression upon you, and believe me to be,

Your friend,

Dr. John H. Watson

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> When I first posted this, it became clear that people had wildly divergent ideas about what really happened. I tried not to confirm or deny them because I kind of liked it that it was ambiguous. Dream sequence? Real events? Watson writing his own self-insert RPF and then sending it to Holmes hoping to start something? Could be any or all of them!
> 
> But, 20 stories in this series later, I have now determined what actually happened, and if you want to revisit this night from Holmes's perspective, you can skip right to [O Pays Merveilleux.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14819867)


End file.
